I work at a nuclear equipment supplier. The focus on paperwork as opposed to real engineering work is something to be in awe at. Process drains competence, bu

I work at a nuclear equipment supplier. The focus on paperwork as opposed to real engineering work is something to be in awe at. Process drains competence, but even under ideal scenarios, these are large, complicated machines, and the base incentives for all layers of management are to underestimate the time and cost to complete a project. For many nuclear projects, cost overruns do not hurt the people who made the initial estimates, and the estimates are impossible to do correctly anyway due to the vast complexity. EDIT: One thing I will also add is that as time goes on, the corpus of knowledge you need to know in order to effectively engineer the parts we supply only grows, as the nuclear fleet ages, documentation rots, and more code editions are released. This means that young engineers face a steeper learning while the graybeards (70 year old engineers, not 35 years old, aka graybeard in software years) face retirement.